Tag: social care

Giles Fraser writes in Unherd today about how the worldview that extols ‘social mobility’ and ‘free movement of people’ also cuts off at the knees the ability of families to care for their youngest and oldest, encouraging everyone instead to see themselves as free, wage-earning individuals and arse wiping as the responsibility of each individual or failing that the state. He asks: whose responsibility should it be to care for those who can’t wipe their own?

First, let me answer the question. Children have a responsibility to look after their parents. Even better, care should be embedded within the context of the wider family and community. It is the daughter of the elderly gentleman that should be wiping his bottom. This sort of thing is not something to subcontract.
Ideally, then, people should live close to their parents and also have some time availability to care for them. But instead, many have cast off their care to the state or to carers who may have themselves left their own families in another country to come and care for those that we won’t.

Now this is all very well and cuts to the heart of the question that more than any other makes me want to wrangle with feminism: the question of who cares. Not as in who gives a stuff, but who wipes the arses of those who can’t wipe their own? Somehow, still, the implicit answer still always seems to be ‘it should be women’. Fraser’s reference to ‘the daughter of the elderly gentlement’ is a reference to an anecdote but I think it goes beyond that: Fraser genuinely thinks that daughters should be wiping their parents’ arses.

I agree with Giles’ assessment insofar as it’s plain to me that the liberal vision of society has some shortcomings on this front. When the vision of the good life says that each of us is (or should be) an individual free of social expectations and obligations, when freedom is seen as a liberation from social obligations (such as arse wiping) that may be boring or unpleasant, then we are left with no happy answers to the question ‘who cares?’.

A feminism that holds this vision of autonomy above all else must necessarily skirt around motherhood and the elderly, because to focus on motherhood and the elderly would be to raise the question of who is wiping those arses, now that we’re all emancipated from domestic drudgery. For wealthier emancipated women, the answer today in practice is: less wealthy women. But who wipes the arses of children and elderly parents for those women who are paid to wipe arses by women who don’t want to wipe arses?

Clearly the blind spot in this discussion is that 50% of the population that Giles also omits to mention in his discussion of our lost bonds of reciprocal caring. Men. The emancipation of (some) women from caring obligations has not been swiftly followed by a stampede of men keen to pick up the shortfall. Men are not clamouring to stay home and look after elderly, incontinent parents. Rather, the assumption seems to be that liberation, liberal-style, means that no-one need wipe arses now unless they’re being paid for it. It’s paid carers all the way down, getting cheaper and more uncaring the further down the economic scale you go, until finally you’re back at women doing it unpaid.

Lost in all of this pass-the-hot-potato attitude to arse wiping is the notion that far from being an infra dig imposition on free individuals, reciprocal caring actually matters – indeed is the glue that binds any functioning society together. So as I wrestle with the question of how we square the evidently painful loss in our society of a valuable set of reciprocal, mutual caretaking obligation with my wish, as a woman, to have at least SOME hours of activity outside domestic drudgery, the only conclusion I can come to is that we – all of us that is, not just women – need to revalorise caring. And that goes for all of us. Those feminists who seem not to want to talk about arse wiping, preferring to focus on workplace sexual mores or female representation in elite career positions or traduce anyone who asks about caring as a fifth columnist for those (presumably closet Nazi) reactionaries who would see us return to the rigidly defined sex-based social roles of days gone by:

It also goes for Fraser, and everyone like him who wishes we could be more communitarian but seems to assume without a moment’s reflection that he can sign women back up for the role they held 50 years ago, without any kind of discussion about maybe improving on those working conditions or asking men to step up as well. It also goes for the rest of us, every time we take a decision that increases our autonomy at the expense of our ability to care. Regardless of our sex.